‘One Piece’ Reveals Original Designs For Akainu

One Piece is one of the longest running and most popular anime and manga series in the world, and a large part of that is because fans are constantly in love with series creator Eiichiro Oda’s outlandish character designs.

His characters often reference real life actors and famous faces in Japan, and that’s the same with Akainu, who Oda recently revealed the original design for.

Eiichiro Oda actually made alterations to Akainu’s face in between his appearance in Weekly Shonen Jump and the full volume release for the series and, as spotted by Twitter user @sandman_AP, revealed the prototype design for the character who ended up looking much different than the final product.

Oda has a lot of respect for Akainu, as he created the character with so much strength in mind that he even joked that if Akainu were the protagonist of the series instead of Luffy then the series “would come to an end” within a year.

Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece first began serialization in Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump in 1997. It has been collected into 87 volumes, with a few chapters yet to be included. It has been a critical and commercial success worldwide with many of the volumes breaking printing records in Japan. The manga has even set a Guinness World Record for the most copies published for the same comic book by a single author, and is the best selling manga series worldwide with 430 million copies sold worldwide.

Eiichiro Oda also revealed some upcoming news for One Piece‘s future at Jump Festa 2018. Not only will the manga see Wano sooner rather than later, the next villain of the series is “one of the legends which lurks in the One Piece world. The greatest enemy ever for Straw Hats will hinder their way…Can you believe Marineford Summit War will look ‘cute’ compared to that?”

The new live-action One Piece series also got some new information as it was revealed that the series will portray the Straw Hats’ adventures from the very beginning, and will take place in the East Blue.

One Piece is currently in the middle of the “Whole Cake Island” arc and is now streaming on Crunchyroll and FunimationNOW.